Turns out, getting shot with a plastic bullet hurts so, so bad, and can definitely make your consciousness yell uncle for a while. Afterward, you have a bruise that goes from your front straight through to your back, and then continues down the road for a while. Right now it hurt so bad that I was sure in five years if someone touched me there, I would scream.
I’d drifted back into consciousness some time ago—maybe half an hour? Maybe ten minutes? It was hard to tell. I was in a vehicle, but not the all-wheeler, because this had a roof and doors. My hands were tied painfully behind my back and I had a black cloth hood over my head. At first I’d asked a bunch of questions, but they’d slapped a piece of duct tape over my mouth, so that was that.
Now that I wasn’t talking, no one else was, either. I’d made out two different voices at first, and I thought the hands that had pushed up my hood just enough for the tape were maybe a woman’s hands. Or a boy’s. I could be surrounded by twenty armed guards, or I could be in the back of someone’s ma’s car with a couple of assholes who didn’t know there’s no one to pay ransom for me.
Not that there had ever been a kidnapping in the cell. Of course, I had left the cell.
Finally the vehicle slowed and I heard a rusty, metallic scraping sound: gates opening. Someone yelled for us to go through. We took a bunch of turns, lefts and rights, before we came to a stop.
My heart was pounding so loud I knew they could hear it. People outside this car or truck or whatever could probably hear it.
I tried to inhale calmly through my nose. When they’d first taped my mouth I’d panicked, trying to breathe so fast that I almost passed out. Now all I was trying to do was stay upright, stay conscious, and not wet my pants from terror.
The vehicle stopped. The door opened. Rough hands grabbed my arms and hauled me out. My legs were wobbly but they held. Someone shoved me forward, so I almost fell, then shoved me again. I started walking, hesitantly, blind, hoping they weren’t sending me straight into a brick wall for laughs.
Another door opened. I stumbled across the threshold. It smelled different in here, like stale air and the industrial cleaner we used at the All-Ways. Someone yanked off my hood and I squeezed my eyes almost shut—the bright light was painful.
I was in a… prison. Not like the little jail we had downtown that hardly ever got used. This was a prison, like I’d seen in books. So they hadn’t taken me back to the cell. Which meant I’d disappeared.
Just like Becca. And the other kids.
And no one would know where I was. Not Steph. Not Nathaniel.
A woman was there, big and broad with odd yellow hair and a very red face. She came up and pulled the duct tape off me—not fast, but not nearly slowly enough.
As soon as I could breathe I gulped in air, my chest rising and falling and my bullet-bruise hurting with each movement.
“Where am I?” I gasped.
A guy in a uniform stepped forward and gave me a smart rap on my arm with a billy club.
“Ow!” I said, then shut up quickly as he raised it again.
I was led down a cement-block hallway with peeling vomit-green paint. Bare lightbulbs flickered overhead, and several times we had to walk through puddles.
Oh, God, where am I? What’s happening?
In a small room, two guards took my clothes, cutting the zip ties on my wrists so they could get my hoodie off. I was shaking with cold as well as hysterical, razor-wire fear, but all they did was throw a yellow jumpsuit at me. I leaped into it as fast as I could.
Down another hall. Through a heavy metal door. Its tiny glass window had wire fused into it. This door opened into a wide hallway with a tall ceiling four stories high. Each story had a walkway around the outside, bordered with a line of barred cages, little jail rooms, one after another.
Each room held kids. Kids who looked like Outsiders, all colors, all types.
The guards shoved me up concrete steps and down one of the walkways. They put me into an empty, barred room, and just then a horrible alarm sounded. The din of hundreds of marching feet filled my ears. Pressing my face against the bars, I saw more kids, all in yellow jumpsuits, filing in and heading to their cages.
Then… one head out of the entire crowd. One face that was like looking into a mirror.
“Becca!” I screamed as loudly as I could. “Becca!”
54
BECCA’S HEAD SNAPPED UP AT my voice, and she met my eyes instantly. In a flash she put a finger against her lips, telling me to be quiet. I was shocked at how different she looked; she was thinner and moved stiffly and slowly. Her hair was a rat’s nest, and any skin I could see was either dirty or discolored with bruises or scrapes.
Kids in jumpsuits began to file past my barred door. No one seemed surprised or curious about my being there. A hulking, uniformed guard stopped in front of me to unlock the door. The bars slid open, and he pushed in a small girl with mouse-colored hair, a light-tan boy, a taller, dark-tan boy… and Becca.
“Get inside!” he shouted as Becca lingered, looking at me like I was an icy soda on a haying day.
The guard pushed her in roughly, then slammed the door shut and locked it. Becca suddenly spun and looked at him in shock. “Tim?”